We need free speech both to search for truth, and to express ourselves. When free speech is silenced, it interferes with both of those core human goals.

And it therefore needs to be said loud and clear: silencing speech is a problem no matter who is doing the silencing.

There is a position on free speech that is all too common in the United States, including – perhaps especially – among avowed leftists who should know better. Fortunately, I think you have to be American to believe it: few others fall into this trap. This false position says that it’s only censorship if the government does it. A particularly noxious example of this harmful position was an xkcd comic several years ago, which asserted that “The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say” – and proceeded to claim that facing harmful consequences like boycotts or the cancellation of a TV show for your opinions has nothing to do with violating free speech. This strip came out in the controversy around Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, who was suspended from his network for anti-gay statements. Because of that context, many supposed and self-proclaimed leftists lauded this statement, according to which it is totally fine for corporations to shut their critics up. Likewise, Stephen Colbert said that “Free speech means the government can’t tell you what to say.”

Now it is perfectly reasonable for libertarians to believe something like this. In the eyes of Ayn Rand or Rand Paul or the Cato Institute or reason.com, only the government ever really oppresses people. Capitalists are good and government bad; our rights, qua rights, are rights against government. Free speech, like any other right, is a right we hold against the government; it has nothing to do with corporations, employers, or any other entities. I’m pretty strongly against that set of views, but the idea that only government can restrict speech at least makes internally coherent sense within it.

But why on earth would leftists believe such a pro-capitalist, corporate idea – one which privileges the free market and therefore could reasonably be called neoliberal? The main culprit, as far as I can tell, is the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which the xkcd comic refers to. That amendment indeed says only that the US Congress shall make no law restricting speech. But the foolish and shameful move which the comic makes is to equate free speech with the First Amendment, as if somehow that was all free speech meant! It is bizarre to me that left-leaning Americans take such a pro-corporate, anti-government interpretation of what free speech means.

Let me cuss to make the point: Nobody outside the United States gives a flying fuck about the First Amendment. Nor have they ever, nor should they. The First Amendment is merely one element in the constitution of one inward-looking country. It stands right beside, and has no higher legal status than, the Second Amendment: that foolish law, justifiably mocked by the rest of the world, which has enshrined mass shootings as a regular, permanent, and singular feature of life in this country. If the First Amendment were all that free speech meant, then there would be no other country, anywhere in the world, in which free speech existed: some other countries have constitutional protections of free speech, some don’t, but none of them have a First Amendment. The First Amendment only restricts the actions of the American government; nothing in the First Amendment prohibits the governments of Iran or Russia from killing people for their speech. So if the First Amendment were the only thing that free speech really meant, then there’d be nothing wrong with Putin punishing his dissidents; after all, it’s not Congress making those laws.

The First Amendment is important, in the United States, because the right to free speech is important; not the other way round. Now I say that normatively rather than practically: the so-called right to bear arms is important in this country, practically speaking, because the Second Amendment’s legal ramifications have such a massive effect on American life, making mass school shootings just a fact of life that we have to get used to, in this country and no other. The First Amendment is important in its own right in that sense – that as with the Second Amendment, we Americans have to live with it no matter how dumb it might actually be. But neither the First nor the Second Amendment is an ideal we should be defending. The ideal that needs defending is the underlying principle. The right to bear arms is a dumb idea; the right to free speech is a very good one. But the fact that the First Amendment only applies to government: that says absolutely nothing about the ideal of free speech itself. Nothing whatsoever.

This is crucial because non-governmental restrictions on speech can stifle truth-seeking and self-expression at least as much as governments can. The threat of job loss, in particular, is often worse than a government sanction. In the Mills’ apt words, “In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.” (58) We spend most of our lives in the institutions of our employment, which often have a bigger impact on our lives than the state does. The loss of our livelihood can be a much bigger penalty for our speech – and therefore a bigger threat to our speech – than being slapped by the government with a fine. It was very much a violation of free speech last year when people lost their jobs for social media posts about Charlie Kirk’s death. But according to xkcd’s or Colbert’s American definition, Kirk’s critics just had it coming.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an American actually argue for the idea that only the government can restrict free speech. It just seems to be something that they are taught in elementary school and never actually think about: file it, perhaps, under lies my teacher told me. I’m not sure what arguments one could make in defence of such an idea – unless, that is, one were a libertarian who believed that all freedom is freedom from the government in the first place. Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan legitimately get to say that freedom of speech is only a restriction on government. If you consider yourself remotely on the left, you don’t.

For a decade, so-called leftists in the Social Justice movement alarmingly cheered the power of corporations to dictate what can and can’t be said. One always wondered: did you really think that power wasn’t going to be used against you eventually? Already by late 2023, Facebook had started censoring pro-Palestinian content, and it’s only gotten worse from there. If you are a leftist and you cheered corporations getting rid of anti-gay or MAGA content, you have been played.

For me, being left-wing is above all about limiting the power of a moneyed ruling class – and by that I don’t mean highly educated “élites”, however harmfully faddish the latter’s views might be. I mean the ones with the actual power: the CEOs and other billionaires who make the real decisions in society. I don’t care whether Elon Musk is the particular oligarch who can tell people what is or isn’t permitted to be said on Twitter (or whatever he’s calling it now). I care very much that oligarchs have the power to tell people what is or isn’t permitted to be said on Twitter.

All this is yet another reason why the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor is a bad defence of free speech. When a theatre decided to refuse to allow Dave Chappelle to perform his comedy, one response tweeted at free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, “this Chappelle episode seems like a classic case of that ‘marketplace of ideas’ that you guys love functioning as it should”. Lukianoff – as someone who truly believes in free speech even when it’s not convenient – rightly objected: it is a loss for free speech when people are cancelled for the content of their ideas, whether or not it is the government that does the cancelling.

The government restricting free speech happens to be illegal in the US, but so does the government restricting gun ownership. Those just happen to be a matter of the US’s current laws, as framed by its slaveholding founders. The law is not the arbiter of what’s right and wrong – if it were, then Uganda would be right to punish homosexuality with life in prison. American laws can be, and should be, used to protect freedom of speech, but to equate freedom of speech with the First Amendment is nonsensical outside the United States, and barely makes any sense here. I’ve never seen anyone outside the US make that bizarre move – so it probably wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t live here.